If the apocalypse comes, beep me.

Buffy was the first North American show that I got into after The X-Files went off the air. That doesn't sound like a huge gap in time, but I didn't actually try Buffy until after the entire series had aired. I was incredibly resistant--friends would insist it was great, but I didn't cave until one friend visited from out of town, put the season one box set on my coffee table, and said he wasn't going to take it away again until my (now-)husband and I had watched it.

It's not my favorite Joss show--that'd be Firefly--but I loved it, and it was what convinced me to give quite a lot of other domestic shows a chance. Without that foot in the door I would've missed out on so many stories that I really love now.

When I was thirteen, I got sent away to Bad Kid School, and when I came back, I found I had lost the ability to watch TV. I still wanted to watch TV, but while I was away it had all turned boring and annoying and I could not stand it.

I spent the next 20-odd years not watching TV. Then I got a livejournal, and a lot of fannish friends, who talked about TV shows in ways that made me want to watch them, or at least to have watched them. Eventually I picked one up.

It was Firefly. It was awesome.

I still remember the "they're making a movie out of what now?" reaction I had to the news there was going to be a Buffy TV series, but I was definitely curious about it .... but even still, a month's worth of episodes had aired before I was starting to hear from my friends, "You have to see this." The first one I saw was The Pack, and I was immediately hooked.

I loved the characters, I loved the idea of high school and Hell as extended metaphors for each other. More than anything, I loved the language, the elliptical playfulness of it. It has, I think, permanently affected my conversations.

I wasn't as struck as most people were by the idea of a kick-ass female protagonist -- I'd grown up watching Wonder Woman, so it never really occurred to me to think a girl couldn't be an action hero.

I never watched Firefly while it was on the air, not once. Not because I didn't think I'd like it -- quite the contrary, I thought I'd love it and I knew it was going to get canceled, it didn't fit neatly into a genre box and I knew Fox wasn't going to know what the hell to do with it. I did give into peer-pressure once the DVDs were out, though, so I got to mourn it retroactively.

Similarly, I knew Dollhouse wasn't going to last .... I know a lot of people avoided that show because the very premise of it was, well, problematic. I think most of those people somehow miss the fact that it was clearly intended to be problematic, that we weren't supposed to think of our lead characters as good people doing good things. (Just as, in many ways, I don't honestly think we were supposed to like Buffy Summers as a person.) I wish it had lasted -- I think it had the potential to be the best thing Joss had ever done.